Murray’s Environmental Club

Lauren Boggs Meslar

Students completing a trash audit of a day’s worth of garbage at Murray to see where we can improve

In the fall of 2022, my then eight year old daughter wanted to start a club about helping the environment. A year and a half later, her and her elementary schoolmates have helped implement a composting program in their school, diverting 1,400 pounds of food waste last school year alone; hosted two school campus litter pick up events, removing eight bags of litter from the school grounds and nature walk; hosted two community swap events to reduce waste, unnecessary consumption, and build community; coordinated “Nude Food” days to reduce packaging waste; written to legislators and companies about improving environmental policies; and spoken at a school board meeting to advocate for ACPS to return to using reusable metal utensils instead of throwing thousands of disposable plastic utensils away every day. WOW!

The club started as the Care For Our Earth club and met outside of school hours, but as many initiatives the kids wanted to start involved their school, Virginia L. Murray Elementary, we reached out to see how we could work with them and advertise student-led events within the school. The solution worked out with the administration was to offer the club as one of the “M3” or “M cubed” (Murray, Mind, Magic) afterschool classes available weekly during three six-week sessions throughout the school year. With Murray PTO’s model of these classes, we were able to offer the club free of charge to students. John Hobson, Assistant Principal at Murray, co-taught the winter and spring sessions last school year with me and we were assisted by Christine Putnam, a part of ACPS’s Advisory Committee for Environmental Sustainability, in utilizing existing local initiatives, thus allowing us to jumpstart composting through ACPS’ Black Bear Composting program, previously only used by our cafeteria workers. Student members of the club helped educate classmates about the reasons to compost, what to compost, and helped monitor students’ composting at the end of lunch. Since Black Bear offers industrial composting, students are able to compost paper napkins and uncoated paper products. Since then, we’ve started working on including paper towel waste from the school restrooms too. (Note: Black Bear Composting is available free of charge at the Ivy MUC Recycling Center. Even if you compost at home, this can be a great resource to take advantage of for “compostable” tableware that is only commercially compostable as well as dropping in a paper bag full of tissues when you’ve got a sick kid at home.)

Students helping monitor the new composting program, spring 2023

Why compost? Did you know…

This cropped infographic comes from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (www.ilsr.org), a national nonprofit organization working to strengthen local economies, and redirect discarded materials into local recycling, composting, and reuse enterprises. It is reprinted here with permission. 

Data sources: ILSR produced this infographic largely based on data shared during our Compost Climate Connections Webinar Series. The amount of world carbon in the soil is from a 2020 statement from the UN Convention to Combat Desertification Executive Secretary Ibrahim Thiaw, available at World Soil Day 2020: Keep soil alive, protect biodiversity. The pie chart of US human-related methane emissions is based on 2020 numbers from the US EPA Landfill Methane Outreach Program (LMOP).

This school year, I’ve co-taught with new-to-Murray teacher Calder McLellan to facilitate students improving our composting program, reaching out to decision-makers in our community and beyond, and helping educate the school population and beyond in ways they can be more environmentally friendly such as turning engines off prior to pick up instead of idling, in addition to continuing to host litter clean ups and community swaps.

Students especially love making posters and announcements to promote events and initiatives.

For events outside of typical M3 hours, students appreciate working as a team, knowing that they can count on enough of their club and community members to be available to get the jobs done.

Students were excited to hear back from several officials they reached out to in the fall of this year about environmental practices.

Students are taking note of and sharing ways in which they can be more environmentally friendly such as not using individually-packaged foods, instead buying in bulk and using reusable containers in their lunch and snacks; hosting Nude Food days where they coordinated with cafeteria staff for plastic-free lunches, has been a great way to publicize this initiative as well as in the Green Tips students created to be shared in the morning announcements; looking at the recyclability of items also, such as knowing only #1s, #2s, and stretchy plastic films are able to be recycled locally – and how easy it is for a mis-sorted or dirty items to end up sending an entire batch of “recyclables” to the incinerator; considering purchases with the thought of how much plastic is used (a paper carton of gumballs vs. a plastic-encased bubble gum tape, for example); encouraging staff to use compostable Keurig pods in their teacher lounge coffee makers; and swapping out metal utensils at school instead of plastic utensils. These kids are becoming thoughtful consumers and advocates for their futures.

This last student-led suggestion was a wake up call to me – other than during COVID, why wasn’t ACPS using metal utensils as they had when I attended ACPS? They have the re-usable trays they wash, why not save thousands of plastic utensils from entering our waste system daily? We went to work reaching out to the county about steps we could take to make this sustainable change at Murray and at all ACPS and looked at studies of other school systems that made the switch successfully. Almost a full year later, after numerous e-mails, letters, and students speaking to the school board about the issue, we received a response from the ACPS Child Nutrition Services Director denying our request. ACPS says it plans to pivot to 90% compostable utensils and containers, though they had setbacks during the pandemic, and attributes their refusal to a cost-analysis, though we’ve found studies suggesting the change can be made with cost savings. One of our missions this spring session of M3 is to look further into this issue and keep pushing for the most sustainable option, metal utensils. We have voiced our concern over the carbon footprint of disposable compostable options, whether they’d be composted in schools that have not geared up their composting programs, and the disposable mindset it perpetuates in students. Students attended an ACES meeting to share these concerns. The director has listened to us and the school board has suggested interest in finding a way to make the pivot to sustainable metal utensils happen. Help us out by sharing your support of switching to metal utensils by reaching out to Superintendent Haas at superintendentoffice@k12albemarle.org.

Video available at: https://youtu.be/ZzoY4unOtVc?si=Lq4xLGasAfZC8Wo6&t=1621

I am so proud of all that the Environmental Club at Murray has been able to accomplish so far and I’m encouraged by the conscientious people they’re growing into. Murray is a great place to grow! There are many other schools with afternoon class programs and club opportunities. If you or someone you know are interested in starting a similar club/class at your school, please feel free to reach out at LCBMeslar@hotmail.com. We would love to help spread this program throughout Albemarle and beyond!